Notes in Brain Rules

8/8/2019 Notes in **Brain Rules**

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Brain Rules by John Medina

Exercise

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

o Our brains were built for walking 12 miles a

day!

o To improve your skills, move.

o Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing itglucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the

toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates

the protein that keeps neurons connecting.

o Aerobic exercise just twice a week halves your

risk of general dementia. It cuts your risk of

Alzheimers by 60 percent.

Survival

Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

o We dont have one brain in our heads; we have

three. We started with a lizard brain to keep usbreathing, then added a brain like a cats, and

then topped those with the thin layer of Jell-O as

the cortex the third, and powerful, human

brain.


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o We took over the Earth by adapting to change

itself, after we were forced from the trees to the

savannah when climate swings disrupted our

food supply.o Going from four legs to two to walk on the

savannah freed up energy to develop a complex

brain.

o Symbolic reasoning is a uniquely human talent. It

may have arisen from our need to understand

one anothers intentions and motivations,allowing us to coordinate within a group.

Wiring

Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently

What you do and learn in life physically changes what

your brain looks like it literally rewires it.

The various regions of the brain develop at different

rates in different people.

No two peoples brains store the same information in

the same way in the same place.


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We have a great number of ways of being intelligent,

many of which dont show up on IQ tests.

Attention

Rule #4: We dont pay attention to boring things.

The brains attentional spotlight can focus on only

one thing at a time: no multitasking.

We are better at seeing patterns and abstracting themeaning of an event than we are at recording detail.

Emotional arousal helps the brain learn.

Audiences check out after 10 minutes, but you can

keep grabbing them back by telling narratives or creating

events rich in emotion.

Short-term memory

Rule #5: Repeat to remember.


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Our brains give us only an approximate view of

reality, because they mix new knowledge with past

memories and store them together as one.

The way to make long-term memory more reliable is

to incorporate new information gradually and repeat it in

timed intervals.

Sleep

Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.

The brain is in a constant state of tension between

cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells

and chemicals that try to keep you awake.

The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical

activity when youre asleep - perhaps replaying what you

learned that day.

People vary in how much sleep they need and when

they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an

afternoon nap is universal.

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function,

working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical

reasoning, and even motor dexterity.


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Stress

Rule #8: Stressed brains dont learn the same

way.Your bodys defense system the release of

adrenaline and cortisol is built for an immediate

response to a serious but passing danger, such as saber-

toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home,

dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with

short-term responses.

Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your

blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and

cortisol damages the cells of the hippocampus, crippling

your ability to learn and remember.

Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that

you have no control over the problem you are helpless.

Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on

childrens ability to learn in school and on employees

productivity at work.

Sensory integration


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Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.

We absorb information about an event through our

senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight,

others from sound, etc) disperse those signals to separate

parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened,

eventually perceiving the event as a whole.

The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in

deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can

perceive the same event very differently.

Our senses evolved to work together vision

influencing hearing, for example which means that we

learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.

Smells have an unusual power to bring back

memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the

thalamus and head straight to their destinations, whichinclude that supervisor of emotions known as the

amygdala.

Vision


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Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.

Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up

half of our brains resources.

What we see is only what our brain tells us we see,

and its not 100 percent accurate.

The visual analysis we do has many steps. The retina

assembles photons into little movie-like streams, some

areas registering motion, others registering color, etc.

Finally, we combine that information back together so wecan see.

We learn and remember best through pictures, not

through written or spoken words.

Gender

Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.

The X chromosome that males have one of and

females have two of though one acts as a backup is a

cognitive hot spot, carrying an unusually large

percentage of genes involved in brain manufactures.

Women are genetically more complex, because the

active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Moms

and Dads. Mens X chromosomes all come from Mom,


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and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes,

compared with about 1,500 for the X chromosome.

Mens and womens brains are different structurally

and biochemically men have bigger amygdala and

produce serotonin faster, for examples but we dont

know if those differences have significance.

Men and women respond differently to acute stress:

Women activate the left hemispheres amygdala and

remember emotional details. Men use the right amygdala

and get the gist.

Exploration

Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Babies are the model of how we learn not bypassive reaction to the environment but by active testing

through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and

conclusion.

Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific

approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our

hypothesis (The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless),and an adjoining region tells us to change behavior

(Run!).


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We can recognize and imitate behavior because of

mirror neurons scattered across the brain.

Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a

babys, so we can create neurons and learn new things

throughout our lives.

Detailed notes

Chapter 1 - exercise

We moved.

Direct correlation between exercise and mental alertness.

Predictor of successful aging is the presence or absence

of sedentary lifestyle

Lifetime of exercise result in elevation of cognitive

performance

Physical activity is cognitive candy.

Chapter 2 survival

Brain appears to be designed to: 1) solve problems 2)

related to surviving 3) in an unstable outdoor environment

4) to do so in nearly constant motion


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Two ways to beat the cruelty of the environment: 1)

become stronger 2) become smarter

See Dual Representational Theory by DeLoache

we are human beings because we can fantasize

Symbolic reasoning is a handy gadget

Re-read later

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Notes in **Brain Rules**

Notes in Brain Rules